IBM ViaVoice

» see ibm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Before ViaVoice would type a single word for you, it made you read to it. The enrollment process put prepared sentences on screen and you spoke them into a headset microphone for an hour or more while the software built a model of your particular mouth. People who did this in 1997 remember the reading, not the dictation. It was the first time a home computer asked its owner for that kind of patience and gave a reason that sounded plausible.

IBM had been at this since well before the box appeared in shops. The Personal Dictation System shipped in 1993, was renamed VoiceType, and ran on OS/2 as well as Windows, which tells you which part of IBM it came from. ViaVoice went on sale in august 1997 at 199 dollars and did the thing the earlier products could not, which was continuous speech. You no longer had to leave a deliberate pause between every single word.

Then it spent eight years losing. Dragon NaturallySpeaking had launched two months earlier and was consistently better at understanding a person it had never met. IBM answered with volume rather than accuracy: an Advanced edition and a Standard edition, a ViaVoice 98 line split by household and office use, a Mac OS X build, a version bundled with its own USB microphone, and in 1999 a free edition given away outright. The version numbers climbed to 10.5 by 2005 and stopped there.

The actual death was an announcement nobody read as one. In 2003 IBM granted ScanSoft exclusive worldwide distribution rights to ViaVoice desktop products for Windows and Mac OS X. ScanSoft owned Dragon. IBM had handed its consumer speech business to its only real competitor and gone back to selling engines to companies. ScanSoft merged into Nuance in 2005, and Nuance had no reason on earth to keep two dictation products alive.

ViaVoice shipped in eight languages and Turkish was not among them, which settles my distance from it without much argument. In 1997 I was thirteen and a year away from my first modem. Even later, when I could have afforded a copy, the product had nothing to offer someone whose first language it had never been trained on. Speech recognition for Turkish stayed a research paper for another fifteen years, and by the time it worked it arrived as a free feature of a phone rather than a box with a microphone in it.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The pitch in 1997 was that typing was about to become optional, and every review of the era opens with a writer describing their aching wrists. What the software actually delivered was an accuracy rate that read well in a magazine and fell apart over a long document. A few wrong words per page sounds like a pass until you have to find each one and fix it by hand, usually with the keyboard you were supposed to have retired.

Where it genuinely worked was in professions with fixed vocabulary and a legal obligation to produce text. Medical and legal dictation kept speech recognition commercially alive through the whole period consumers were abandoning it, because a radiologist saying the same two hundred phrases all day is a much easier problem than a person writing an email.

~ where the name went ~

IBM did not stop doing speech, it stopped selling it in a box. Embedded ViaVoice went into cars, and Honda was the first manufacturer to put an in-car navigation system on it. The software came standard in the 2005 Acura RL and was an option on the Odyssey the same year, which means the last mass-market thing to carry the ViaVoice name was a dashboard telling somebody to turn left.

That is a quieter ending than it looks. The desktop product died because IBM concluded that talking to your computer was not a business, then licensed the same technology to an industry that would pay for it precisely because the alternative in a moving car is worse than dictation. The problem was never the recognition. It was that sitting alone at a desk, typing is faster and it does not require you to say your sentences out loud before you know what they are.

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